Our Say: Finally, Anne Arundel's watershed program gets to the good stuff

Jul 17, 2018 | 6:00 AM

Erik Michelsen, administrator of the Anne Arundel County Watershed Protection and Restoration Program discusses an upcoming project to remove a concrete stormwater management channel on Furnace Creek in Glen Burnie and restore it to a more natural stream and wetland habitat system.

Finally, we get to the good stuff in watershed restoration.

Anne Arundel County is about to embark on its most ambitious project yet in the multiyear effort to clean up its waterways by addressing decades of stormwater runoff pollution.

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For anyone who hasn’t seen the stormwater sluice on Furnace Creek in Glen Burnie, it is something of an engineering marvel. Or at least it was when it was built in the 1960s. It is essentially a cement roadway for water to run straight into the creek— filled with trash, sediment and other pollutants that have made the north county waterway a mess.

The upgrade will convert the nearly 20-foot wide cement channel that has been carrying stormwater swiftly downstream since 1963 into a nearly 5-acre broad wetland stream complex.

The project may be the largest undertaken in north county. And it’s one of the dozens planned for the Tidal Patapsco watershed in the county’s comprehensive Watershed Protection and Restoration Program.

Residents of the Annapolis area or south county can’t realize the difference in the scale of the work to be done in north county unless they’ve seen it.

The majority of the funding for this project comes from the stormwater fee — about $80 per household, per year — enacted to pay for the nearly $1 billion backlog in the watershed and stormwater-related work needed to help meet federal pollution standards.

During the 2014 campaign surrounding the fee, environmentalists said that within one or two years of the completion of some of the large projects, there would be a noticeable improvement in water quality.

Furnace Creek has a long way to go. Historically, it has some of the highest bacteria counts in the county.

There already has been an improvement in water quality on the Chesapeake Bay, although most of that may be due to upgrades in Maryland’s wastewater treatment facilities and dry weather that has reduced the amount of runoff.

The residents of Glen Burnie whose environment will be changed by this project — it is, after all, a massive change in their backyard — are not the first to benefit from the funding, and they won’t be the last. But they are getting the first big bang.